2025-09-19 17:45:00
Hi everyone,
Just some updates about upcoming travel and events; responses to the recent post about social media platforms; and some thoughts about the Bear license update.
I'll be heading to Istanbul next week for Microconf, which is a yearly conference where non-venture track founders get together, explore a new city, and learn from one another. I had meant to go to the one last year in Croatia, but had just gotten back from two months in Vietnam, and the thought of travelling again so soon felt daunting.
I've made two Bear t-shirts for the conference. One light and one dark mode—inspired by the default Bear theme. Let's see if anyone notices!
If you live in Istanbul and want to grab coffee, I'm keen! If you've previously travelled to Istanbul and have recommendations for me, please pop me an email. I have a few days to explore the city.
I received so many great emails from people about my post on slow social media. There are many great projects underway at the moment, and many great projects that unfortunately didn't make it. Some notable standouts to me:
Unfortunately no longer with us:
Here are some projects that are up-and-running. These aren't necessarily all "social networks", nor necessarily viable at scale, but each of them has an element or two that makes them interesting.
There were many other projects in various states of development that I haven't had the time to fully explore yet, but I'll get to them over the next week or so.
Somehow my post about the change in the Bear source code license exploded on Hacker News, Tildes, Lobsters, and Reddit, and has been read over 120,000 times.
The vast majority of the emails and responses I received were positive, but about 10% of the Hacker News crowd got really mean about it without taking the time to understand the context. I guess I can't expect empathy from 120,000 people.
Regardless, if you're interested in reading about the controversy The Grizzly Gazette covered it quite well.
While I don't feed the trolls on Hacker News (and find comments to be a pretty poor place to have nuanced discussions in general), I'd like to respond to a few of the main critiques here.
While Bear (the platform) has a community—and a very good one at that; the source-code part of Bear has never been community oriented. Bear doesn't accept code contributions and the code has been written by me personally. I have not engaged in the exploitation of free developer labour, nor used it being open-source as marketing material.
I suspect that these kinds of comments arose from the (justified, but ultimately misguided) assumption that the Bear project had active contributors and a community surrounding the code itself.
Yes, I shouldn't have released Bear on an MIT license in the beginning. I didn't even think about licenses when I launched Bear in 2020 and just used the default. I also didn't expect free-ride competition to be an issue in this space. So, this is a justifiable criticism, even if it feels like it was made in bad faith.
This was a common criticism, but fails to resolve the main reason for this change: people forking and hosting a clone of Bear under a new name, social elements and all. The AGPLv3 license only specifies that they would need to release their version of the code under the same license. This doesn't dissuade free-ride competition, at least not in this context.
Bear's source code was never meant to be used by people to set up competing services to Bear. It was there to ensure that people understand what's going on under the hood, and to make the platform auditable. I specify this in the CONTRIBUTIONS.md that was last updated 2 years ago.
In summary, Bear is a platform, not a piece of self-hostable software. I think these criticisms are justified sans-context. With context, I don't think the same arguments would have been made. But Hacker News is well known for nasty comments based on the title of the post alone.
Aaand we're done! Lots of updates. Please feel free to email me your thoughts, recommendations, or anything else. If you haven't dug through my past posts, here're a few lesser-read posts that I enjoyed writing:
If you haven't subscribed to my blog, you can do it via the RSS feed or email.
Have a goodie!
2025-09-16 17:44:00
People often assume that I hate social media. And they'd be forgiven for believing that, since I am overtly critical of current social media platforms and the effects they have on individuals and society; and deleted all of my social media accounts back in 2019.
However, the underlying concept of social media is something I resonate with: Stay connected with the people you care about.
It's just that the current form of social media is bastardised, and not social at all. Instead of improving relationships and fostering connection, they're advertisement-funded content mills which are explicitly designed and continually refined to keep you engaged, lonely, and unhappy. And once TikTok figured out that short-form video with a recommendation engine is digital crack, all other social media platforms quickly sprang into action to copy their secret sauce.
Meta basically turned Instagram and Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content'. Even Pinterest is starting to look like TikTok! They followed user engagement, but not the underlying preferences of their users. I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
I don't think most people using these platforms understand that they are the product. Instagram isn't built for you. It's built for marketers. It's built for celebrities to capitalise on their audiences. It's built for politicians and their cronies to sway sentiment. It's built to be as addictive as possible, and to capitalise on your insecurity and uncomfortability.
Imagine that, society and politics are on the rocks all so a fitness influencer can sell you their "Abs in 30 days" training program.
These platforms are the quintessential poster child for late-stage capitalism.
Okay, now that we've established what the problems with current platforms are—what would a non-evil social media platform look like?
I'd love to see everyone running a blog, and subscribing to the people they care about via RSS. But unfortunately this doesn't scale since it requires effort to put your thoughts down in writing longer than 255 characters. I have many friends who don't even know I have a blog, or what an RSS reader is.
So while everyone blogging may be the ideal we can aspire to, let's design a hypothetical social media platform that takes the good aspects of current social media, while creating pro-social incentives.
The platform should be about:
The platform should NOT be about:
In my opinion, as soon as there is the ability for commercial interests to take hold, they will. The "follow" mechanism is a key part of that. I propose that instead of followers we should regress back to the "friend" or "connection" system where there is a symmetric relationship where both people have to agree to the connection. There is no good reason to have "followers" on a platform that is trying to improve relationships. "Following" is purely for egotistical or financial gain and breeds parasocial relationships.
I think there should also be a reasonable cap on the number of connections that can be made. Something like 300 friends sounds right. Any more than that and you're a collector, and not using the platform to foster connection.
This feature alone already removes 90% of the marketing interests in the platform. Do you want to make a connection, but are maxed out? You'll need to unfriend someone first.
The second necessary element would be a chronological feed with posts from your connections. This turns the platform from an engagement engine into a way to keep up with what everyone else is doing, but importantly, gives you a natural "end" to the feed when you start seeing posts you've already viewed. This way when you start scrolling there's an explicit stopping point.
Relatedly, pagination is more humane than infinite-scroll since it gives users a natural breathing point where they can decide whether they want to keep going. Infinite-scroll is such an obvious user-trap, and I view any website doing it as not having its user's best interests at heart.
And finally, there should be a reasonable cap on the number of times a user can post per day. Roughly 5 times per day feels like the upper threshold of what you can post while being intentional about what it is you're posting. This will keep the feed reasonably populated without one or two people completely overwhelming it.
The rest of the platform can be optimised to be as easy-to-use as possible. Something like a mixture between the old Instagram and Twitter, with comments and reactions. No reels or any other recommendation system to keep people engaged to death. And no analytics, since that would be optimising for reach and engagement instead of the stated goal of connection.
Do I expect a platform like this to succeed? Not by the traditional metrics of success. In the real world it would exist alongside the content mills, which are exciting by design and competing for attention. Could it work in niche groups, or amongst intentional people who are sick of the current platforms? Maybe.
Naturally, a project like this would have to be funded somehow, and unfortunately very few people are willing to pay $5 per month for software services, even if they use it every day. However, I suspect that a social media platform like this would be manageable enough that a small team could run it fairly cheaply and profitably if they're creative. Perhaps with nothing but donations.
Who will create this egalitarian social media? Not me, that's for sure. I already have my fair share of work moderating the Bear discovery feed, to the extent I've had to bring on a second moderator (hello Sheena!) to keep it clean of spam and other nasty things that free services on the internet attract.
That being said, I would love to see something like this. I'd love to be able to stay connected with friends and family abroad without having my attention sold to the highest bidder.
If anyone is working on something like this, I'd be happy to consult.
2025-09-10 19:35:00
If you're not aware yet, in 2022 Alphabet paid Apple $20 billion for Google to be the default search engine on Apple devices, according to unsealed court documents in the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google. This is because defaults matter. The vast majority of people use the default search engine/browser/maps/setup that a devices comes standard with. They also just live with the default notification settings, which I've written about before in an essay on digital hygiene.
Say what you will about Apple, but they do care about user experience more than the other big tech companies. This is mostly because the value-exchange with Apple is clear: You give them money, and in return they give you good hardware and software, and a commitment to privacy.
With Google this relationship is more nebulous. Google gives you a free search engine, free email, free document editing and storage, a free browser, free maps, and a bunch of other useful services; but the money comes from...elsewhere. It comes from influencing your buying decisions, and selling your data and attention to marketers; along with a whole host of privacy and security infringements along the way.
I understand why Google paid Apple all that money. Not only does it send lots of high value traffic to Google, but it also disincentivises Apple from creating their own search engine and competing with Google in this space.
Yet Apple is also the company that runs ads like this:
By accepting Alphabet's money, Apple essentially sold their user-base to Google. They paid lip-service to privacy until commercial interests dictated otherwise. If Google was the default search engine without money changing hands, Apple could argue that they just selected the best or most-popular search engine. But because that spot was bought and paid for, it's a big black mark on their commitment to privacy.
Complaining about corporate interests chasing profit aside, here's my hot take: If Apple really cared about privacy, not only should they choose a different search engine, they should block ads and trackers in Safari by default.
There are other browsers that do this; and it's fairly trivial to set up an ad-blocker in Safari yourself. But so few people do. Every now and then I find myself on one of those content-y websites without an ad-blocker, and it feels like I've entered a casino on crack—with animated banners, sliders, and flashing ads interspersing the content.
Seizure-inducing websites aside, advertising-driven tracking is a privacy nightmare, as is the personal-data-economy that underpins it all.
Here's the thing: Apple could do this tomorrow. They could easily make Safari block ads by default. And yet they don't, despite it not being in their user's best interests. This would cripple Google, true; but it's asymmetric. As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't rely on Google for anything. Yet there's nothing illegal about Apple blocking ads and trackers by default. Hell, I'm surprised the EU hasn't mandated it yet.
And Google isn't even paying them $20 billion a year to prevent this!
So if there're any higher-ups at Apple who read my blog, hello!
I'm not suggesting Apple go full nuclear right away, but this should at the very least be part of the conversation around what respecting users and their privacy means.
And if Apple does pull this off, I'll finally believe the billboards.
2025-09-01 19:50:00
When I started building Bear I made the code available under an MIT license. I didn't give it much thought at the time, but knew that I wanted the code to be available for people to learn from, and to make it easily auditable so users could validate claims I have made about the privacy and security of the platform.
Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service. And it hurts. It hurts to see something you've worked so hard on for so long get copied and distributed with only a few hours of modification. It hurts to have poured so much love into a piece of software to see it turned against you and threaten your livelihood. It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it.
After the last instance of this I have come to the difficult decision to change Bear's license from MIT to a version of copyleft based on the Elastic License.
(edit: I chose this license over AGPL since I'm explicitly trying to prevent "free-ride competition", which AGPL doesn't protect against.)This new license is almost identical to the MIT license but with the stipulation that the software cannot be provided as a hosted or managed service. Everything else is still permitted. You can view the specific wording here.
After spending time researching how other projects are handling this, I realise I'm not alone. Many other open-source projects have updated their licenses to prevent "free-ride competition" in the past few years.123456
We're entering a new age of AI powered coding, where creating a competing product only involves typing "Create a fork of this repo and change its name to something cool and deploy it on an EC2 instance".
While Bear's code is good, what makes the platform special is the people who use it, and the commitment to longevity.
I will ensure the platform is taken care of, even if it means backtracking on what people can do with the code itself.
2025-08-22 15:45:00
I workout 4 days a week and I love it. It's the foundation of my morning routine, following spending 45 minutes drinking coffee on the couch and watching the sun come up with Emma.
I've been doing this for a few years now and while I struggled (as everyone does) in the beginning, I can't imagine not exercising in the morning now. On the rare occasion that I do skip a workout, I feel it missing throughout the day as a lack of vitality and less mental clarity.
Let's perform a thought experiment to work out the return on investment of exercise. For this let's first assume that exercise does nothing else but expand your lifespan (not extend; since it's not just adding frail years to the end but instead injects extra years in each stage of life). We can ignore the effects it has on strength, focus, feelings of accomplishment, and mental health for now.
It's well understood that a good exercise routine is a mixture of strength, mobility, and cardio; and is performed at a decent intensity for 2-4 days a week for at least 45 minutes. This could be a combination of weight lifting, yoga, running, tennis, hiking, or whatever floats your boat.
This totals about 3 hours a week, or 156 hours per year. If we extrapolate that over an adult lifetime, that's about 8,500 hours of exercise, or about a year of solid physical activity.
That sounds like a lot! But when put into the context of life expansion, it's actually an incredibly good deal. There are many studies detailing how any physical activity, from an easy walk all the way up to vigorous exercise a few times a week increases expected lifespan by 3 to 10 years. And none of these studies used lifetime exercisers, just people who exercised regularly in the last 10-ish years.
This makes sense, since 80 years ago we were still fighting the second world war, and jogging only entered the mainstream in the 70s. Weightlifting was an even later bloomer, and only becoming cool in the 90s!
I speculate that a lifetime exerciser with a modern approach to physical activity would have an even longer health and lifespan than any of these studies suggest. But for this writeup I want to stick with conservative estimates and not speculate too much.
We know from one study that people who played tennis a few times per week lived roughly 10 years longer than average. So we'll use that value going forward.
That means that over a lifetime, one full year of exercise leads to 10 full years of extra life. That's a 1:10 return on investment! So even without any of the additional benefits (which I'll get into later), this is still one of the best investments you can make.
Yes, this is an oversimplification. Correlation between exercise and longevity doesn’t imply causation. Confounding factors like diet, socioeconomic status, and healthcare access influence lifespan. Attributing 10 years solely to exercise ignores these; but it does play a significant factor, as many well-controlled studies will attest to.
This is also based on the premise that all of the time spent exercising is "wasted", which is hardly the case. People love running, playing padel with friends, lifting heavy things, and hiking. I love being in the gym, working towards mini-goals, making progress, and interacting with the community around me. This is not time wasted. I'll posit for many people it's the best part of their day. Not only that but it leaves you feeling accomplished, wholesome, and less depressed and anxious.
To end off I'll rattle off a few other things exercise is good for:
And this is injected into every single part of your life and available in every decade. Not just at the end.
And this is inherently doable. This is the time equivalent of one episode of any Netflix show, 4 times a week. I watched 3 episodes of Pantheon on Monday alone!
So go do the thing. Incrementally at first. Start off slow and build up a practice that feels right. You won't regret it.
2025-08-13 17:25:00
This is part 3 of a 3 part series on digital hygiene. I suggest starting at part 1.
Whenever I watch heist movies, I always roll my eyes at the "hacker" character. They can consistently hack building's camera system; or download the contents of a target's phone for use later in the heist. They also manage to hack the bank, which questions the need for a heist in the first place.
While there are real-world programatic attack vectors that can be exploited, they're generally opportunistic. When a new vulnerability has been discovered, nefarious actors try to exploit it at scale before it’s patched. The chances of finding and executing a "hack" on the spot (via bluetooth or something equally ridiculous) is highly unlikely.
Although, I digress. The most common vulnerability is significantly more boring. It's compromised passwords. These can be stolen through social engineering, like phishing, that exposes account details; but it's also likely exposed through a data leak, where a service hasn't stored passwords securely, and thousands of email+password pairs are stolen. These authentication details are then systematically tested on a bunch of other services in the hopes that some people have re-used their passwords, and thereby gain control over those accounts.
And that brings me to the topic of today's post: Password hygiene.
Leaked or stolen passwords are by far the most effective way to hack an account. And so it is imperative that everyone who uses the internet, which accounts for 93% of people in the developed world, to spend some time ensuring that their accounts and login information are secure.
On Bear Blog, the blogging platform I run, it is interesting to see the frequency with which the Forgot Password flow is used1. This is a pretty good indication of the number of people who do not store their passwords properly, since it should never be the case that you've forgotten your password. You should never have to remember your passwords in the first place.
I wonder how many work hours are lost globally due to people following the forgot password flow.
I have hundreds of accounts online, everything from my bank, to a free tool for converting ebooks. If I don't reuse any passwords (which I don't, see above) I'll have hundreds of email+password pairs. I certainly can't remember hundreds of different passwords and match them to the relevant services; and outside of a small subset of people, neither can anyone else.
Before I saw the light and started using a password manager, I used to use a password cipher of my own design. I'd take a string of letters, symbols, and numbers, say !xlk-bd15j-hjk, then replace a certain character with the first letter of the service I was accessing. So for example, if I was trying to access Amazon and the character I'd replace was the 6th one, the password for that service would be !xlk-ad15j-hjk.
This setup isn't very secure (but it is still better than using the same password everywhere). It works until it doesn't. The first issue I ran into with this is that some services had extra password requirements like needing at least one capital letter or a number. The second issue is that this leads to password re-use for all services with the same starting character in their name. And finally, some services do require that you change your password regularly (more on that later), so I'd have to remember which accounts had updated passwords, generally by adding a 1 at the end of it.
It is possible to get extra creative with this, and I did for a while, running a bash script to generate passwords on the fly by taking in the name of the service and hashing it. A storage-less password manager, if you will. But this turned out to be pretty inconvenient, especially since this is a solved problem.
Enter the password manager.
Keeping passwords and 2FA recovery codes safe is easy, you just need to decide on a tool, and stick with it.
There are lots of great password managers out there like Dashlane, 1Password, or Bitwarden. I'm quite partial to Apple's built-in password manager because it syncs between my devices and integrates seamlessly with Apple's biometric authentication, making every login a simple fingerprint scan.
Once you've chosen a password manager, you set a master password. This is the most important password so it is never to be forgotten or written down2. I find using a passphrase is both higher entropy, and easier to remember than a password. Here's a classic XKCD comic explaining password entropy.
Now, every time you log into a service or use the forgot password flow, ensure that you put the password into your password manager, or generate a brand new password using the password manager's built-in generator. You'll only need to do this once per service, and from then on you can use the password manager to login to that service. Another reason I like Apple's password ecosystem is that a lot of this is done by default, without having to manually copy and paste passwords. Password managers do have browser extensions and mobile apps to make this easier across devices. Use them.
Your password manager will also generally alert you of password re-use. If the password has been used multiple times, I'd recommend going and updating all of the accounts. The best way to think about this is that at some point the password will be leaked. Which accounts are you comfortable having compromised? Naturally something like banking or email needs to be updated as a priority, but if it's for a background removal tool...actually, still update it. Why not?
Let's talk about 2-factor authentication (2FA), also known as multi-factor authentication (MFA). While there is a slight difference between 2FA and MFA (hint: it's the number of factors), I'll be using them interchangeably here.
MFA is a security measure to prevent access to an account where the login details have been compromised. Generally if you have good password hygiene and are vigilant about phishing attacks, this is unlikely. However, for high priority accounts it is a necessary security step.
SMS 2FA tends to get a lot of hate, justifiably, due to sim-swap attacks. However, the reason many retail services (like banks) still use SMS instead of TOTP authentication is due to retail customers not having good recovery code storage and backup. If you use Google Authenticator or a similar tool, and do not back up your codes, losing your device is an effective way to lock yourself out of your account. Banks rely on the assumption that you'll reclaim your mobile number, whereas the same cannot be said about lost TOTP recovery codes.
That all being said, if you have the option to use a TOTP authentication code instead of SMS or email 2FA, I highly recommend you do that. You'll just need to ensure you've backed up your recovery codes.
I'm going to say something quite controversial here: I think it's okay to back up your recovery codes in your password manager.
While it does mean that if your password manager is compromised, then all of your accounts (including the ones protected by MFA) are exposed, MFA is generally there to protect against compromised login details and not against a compromised password manager. If your password manager is hacked...I'm sorry. You're going to have a tough time.
At the end of the day, the best tools are the tools you use. I like how Apple's 2FA codes also populate with biometric authentication, removing the need for me to go and find my phone (which I generally leave in another room while I'm working).
Some side notes:
As frustrating as it is, it's up to us developers to account for human folly and bad password hygiene. I'd love to create a webservice that only has a username and password with no need for an email address. But I know that I'll receive regular emails asking about account recovery due to a lost or forgotten password.
tldr; Get a password manager, and use it exclusively. Don't try to remember passwords. It's easier and more secure this way. Having good password hygiene makes you significantly less likely to wake up one day with your bank account drained.
As the old joke goes: If you're running away from a bear, you don't need to be faster than a bear, just faster than everyone else.
It turns out there is a small subset of people who use the Forgot Password flow as their main means of authentication, never even trying to store/remember their passwords. This makes sense as it does function as "magic link authentication", but does seem very inconvenient to me. I hate having to go into my email in order to log in.↩
It has been pointed out to me that writing down the master password isn't inherently insecure, as long as it's not stored contextually. So while it should be fine to write it down somewhere (especially if you're liable to forget it), don't write it on a sticky note titled "Password:" and stick it to your monitor.↩